The Rights of God
by Shiro Ryuu
Summary: Yami Bakura recalls the revelations he had during his time in the Ring. Warning: this is an attempt to understand the psychology of murderers, and is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. It scares me that I wrote this, seriously.


**AN: **OMG. Yeah, I don't know if I managed to convey everything I was thinking of perfectly, but I still believe that this is probably the sickest thing I've ever written... and it doesn't even have sex in it! xD Seriously, I'm warning you, this story is morbid and sick. I almost wish I'd posted this on my alternate account, so that all the people who normally read my stories wouldn't know how sick I am xD Okay, I blame... _The Talented Mr. Ripley._ One seriously disturbing movie; I think I found it more haunting than any horror film I've ever watched, and it was definitely a large part of what drove me to write this (though that may not be particularly obvious outside of my twisted little world, other than in the fact that they're both about the psychology of murderers...). But in any case, even though this story seems to be saying that you should never ignore your true self, I really don't think I actually want to know what caused me to write this—so I'm just gonna shut up now, okay? I hope ya'll... erm, enjoy... and review, of course ;)

P.S. Leeayre? If you're reading this, I'll just say that I am _so_ sorry T.T I'll work on My Immortal soon, but I really needed to get this out of my system ('cause you really didn't want me trying to write Kharl/Rath fluff when I was in this kind of mood, trust me!).

* * *

**The Rights of God**

* * *

How well do you think any of us _really_ understand who we are?

Oh, people are always telling you to look deeper into yourself. You've probably heard that crock so often that you've become desensitized to it. I think that just _looking_ at yourself is inevitable; people are constantly trying to figure out who they are, and they frantically attempt to define themselves through their actions every day.

I propose that, at our most basic level, we cannot define ourselves through mere actions. I suppose the question is something like, what makes us choose which situations to confront and take action against in the first place? Every child is born with certain characteristics that set it apart from other children, and it is only childish inability to express oneself that conceals these differences. As the child grows, it will consciously or—more often—subconsciously choose which of its characteristics to suppress or emphasize according to the expectations of society. Moreover, I believe that by the time the child becomes an adult, it will almost always be living so far from its true desires that the knowledge of them could very well crush it.

* * *

But these reflections are just the trailing end of my tale. I am really writing this in quite bad form; not only have I begun at the end, but I have also failed to set the scene or introduce the characters.

Quite early on in life, I lost the last remnants of my humanity, and I now exist as a creature appropriately named 'yami'. I am a disembodied spirit living in the back of the mind of a young boy whose name—Bakura—I have taken for myself, and through an ancient item I am able to possess his body and work my will on the world. Of course, it has not always been like this.

Three thousand years. That is the amount of time I spent trapped in the item, because the gods believed they had the right to punish me. No human being could hope to truly comprehend such a span of time; I awoke to discover that whole civilizations had risen and fallen in my absence. Mankind has tamed lightening, mapped every corner of the world in the minutest detail, and even proven that the moon is made of mere rock and dust, and I spent this entire incomprehensible expanse of time in a single room—never sleeping, never eating, never dying...

When I first realized the inevitability of my fate—that I would lie dormant within the Ring for three thousand years before awakening to face the Pharaoh again—I suppose I expected to be enveloped by the darkness of slumber. Imagine how disorienting it would have been if that time could have seemed to pass with no more than a few dreams! Sometimes I wonder if it had gone this way for the Pharaoh—his missing memories, however, lead me to hope that _he_ really was crushed.

In any case, I was quite surprised to find myself in an empty room. As the hours passed, my surprise quickly turned to panic as I realized that there was no door—and suddenly there was. Confused but delighted, I raced through it, only to find myself stepping back in to the same blank room...

As the days passed and I began to suspect that this was really where I was meant to spend the next three thousand years, I wished other things into that room. No food would come, but I was no longer hungry. No, what I truly wanted was a sword, and _that_ appeared in my hands quite willingly. I experienced the pain, the terror, and the growing numbness of my lifeblood streaming out of my throat and filling my lungs, and I closed my eyes... and opened them again, and raised trembling fingers to unblemished skin. I wondered, not for the first time, how anyone could claim to love gods who could be so cruel even to sinners—which was ironic, as I had not even experienced their cruelty yet.

I died many times at the beginning, because I could not think of anything else to do. Water, fire, poison, smothering, hanging—I even dared to imagine that the room suddenly became too small to hold me. I cannot say how long this took, because there was no sun or moon or even hunger or sleeping to mark the passing of time, but eventually I could endure this routine no longer. I filled the room with treasures and soft couches instead, and created a window with a view of the sparkling Nile. I could also not endure this last very long, however. The room could only replicate things that were already in my mind, and something with as much life as a river is too ever-changing to create from memories alone. Put another way, I could accurately imagine an image of the thing, but never the thing itself—in the same way that a painter can capture his impression of a creature and is called 'good' if this impression is similar to the impressions of others, and yet it would be downright preposterous for him to even _consider_ attempting to create a being that actually lives and breathes...

In the same way I could not recreate the few books that I had had time to read in my short life, nor any of the works of art I had seen. I attempted to create my own works of art instead—but art is the imitation of life, just another facet of mankind's instinctive desire to _create_ life, and I had no life to imitate.

Did you know that people today have attempted to make sense of a person's ability to deal with traumatic situations by dividing the process up into steps? My host has taken quite an interest in this science of psychology, perhaps in an attempt to understand me or perhaps in an attempt to learn how he himself can cope with my presence... A popular model set forth in a book titled _On Death and Dying _names these steps as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and there may be some truth to this. If the first phase I went through was denial, then the second was certainly anger.

I don't think it's any wonder that my desire for revenge became so all-consuming, when I hit upon it so early on. Sometimes I would pace the floor of my little room, destroying and recreating my imagined possessions in passing as I became more and more violent from rage at not being able to achieve my retribution. Other times I would lie on my fine couch for ages simply picturing what it would be like to send him to the other side, and I vowed that I could endure any hell for that moment—perhaps this was 'bargaining'?

How much time do you suppose has passed, reader? Perhaps a year? Of course no one will ever know for certain, but I want you to think about this, and really try to feel it: a single year, in the face of three thousand...

Eventually, when I had played out every scenario for utterly destroying the Pharaoh that I could imagine, I began to lose interest in revenge. The times that I would lie back and envision his demise gradually became more frequent and less focused, until I realized that I had been lying quite still for some time without thinking of anything in particular, and had no desire to do anything else. This lethargy, uninterrupted by hunger or other petty needs, was perhaps the closest I could get to sleep, but even it was not truly restful. Eventually some ache in my body would force me to move, and I would be reminded of the texture of the fabric I was lying on, and my heartbeat and breathing would suddenly become deafening. I told myself that this could not be, that I could not even really have a body if I could not eat or sleep or die, but I guess the sensations of a beating heart and breathing lungs were just too deeply ingrained into my human mind.

Another thing I have learned from my host's research is that some people tend to grow emotionally in a straight line—while not all of their changes may be positive, they are nevertheless almost always moving forward, rarely regressing—but I just don't see how such a lifestyle could have been possible in my situation. Rather, I believe I grew in a spiral, reexamining myself again and again in three thousand different lights. Even after a _millennium_ I was still trying to define myself through my actions, whether it was the passive resistance of doing and thinking nothing, or begging the gods to end my punishment as I slit my throat once again.

As you might imagine, being trapped in such a cycle is an agony in of itself. I began to believe that nothing I thought mattered, as I would simply move on to the next step eventually, and perhaps this realization was what finally drove me to insanity. I can recall believing that there were others with me, watching me just out of sight, and having hallucinations so vivid I swore I could feel them—of everything from eating to sex to wind on my face. But not even madness could defeat the centuries, and eventually reality returned to me.

_This_ is what leads me to believe that the passage of time broke the Pharaoh. When I first awoke to the realization that I had been insane, I also discovered that I could no longer remember my life before this one little room. I could not recall how I had come to be there, or why; I could not even recall my name. My dimly-lit little lair was full to the brim with treasure, but this failed to spark my memory, and I was filled with dread.

In the end I was forced to wonder what—with no motivation that I could remember—I wanted out of life. Did I maybe yearn for the things I had seen in my delirium—sex, food, the wind on my face? Did I long for there to be other people near me? I thought about this for some time, but I realized that it could not be true. I could picture so vividly death dirges and autumn, darkness and warm, warm blood, and for the first time in my life these thoughts horrified me.

In the past I had always been confidant that I could kill anyone attempting to harm me without compassion, and indeed I had done so many times. Kura Eruna was in many ways an extension of myself, because all my loved ones had been there, so seeking revenge for their deaths had hardly been different. In other words, in the past I had always killed in obedience to my survival instinct—a perfectly normal part of any human being and, though highly sophisticated, essentially the same as the survival instinct found in all animals. It was also true that I had enjoyed these kills... but suddenly I understood that that emotion was always mere relief at defeating an enemy.

For the first time I was aware of what ecstasy it would be to watch pomegranate-red blood mingling with matted hair and dripping sluggishly from a smashed-in skull, and it was not the vivid image but the pleasure it gave me that made my stomach turn. It was as if some sickening worm had crawled into my mind, and I wondered if maybe I had not recovered from my madness after all—but _then,_ I realized that I had actually always been like this!

When I was a very small child, hadn't I hung on every word of the ghost stories of man-eating old crones that my mother would tell me to keep me from wandering outside at night? Hadn't I secretly felt this same sick thrill at the sight of a man who had lost an eye in a fight? When had I stopped feeling this...?

...very suddenly, actually. It had been my sweet younger sister who had put a stop to it; I remembered now. We had been playing at an abandoned house past the edge of Kura Eruna, and she had fallen from the roof and broken her arm. Oh, I thought, how had I forgotten this? It suddenly so clear in my mind that it almost could have been another hallucination: her screams and tears; her writhing body in the sand like a snake with its head cut off; the bone protruding from tattered flesh, so strange that I wanted so badly to reach out and touch it... and her horrified look, and how she tried so desperately to squirm away from me... Her terror frightened me at least as much, and as I ran for help I told myself that I must never allow myself to feel something so wrong again. I was filled with conviction in a way that only a frightened child could be, and eventually even the dark dreams were suppressed...

I wondered what it was in me that could possibly drive me to want to watch my beloved sister bleed. Surely this couldn't be normal, shouldn't be accepted; what purpose would it serve to hurt and kill without reason? Why would any creature, which should rightly only feel the instinct for survival and procreation, feel such a morbid desire so strongly...?

_Why, why, why­_—and suddenly I felt angry at my little sister. Why should I have to explain myself, anyway? Just because it couldn't be explained by logic didn't stop it from being a real desire! How dare my sister shy away from the brother she claimed was so dear to her? If she had truly loved me, she should have been willing to give me whatever I wanted...

This sweeping revelation filled me with a new conviction. For the first time I knew what _I_ wanted, not what the animal instincts within me told me to achieve. Suddenly the very thought that other people could be of the same species as myself disgusted me, for none of them were strong enough to seek out their true identity—indeed, many of them were too idiotic to even realize that they needed to! I would _prove_ that I was superior to them, even if it meant killing every single one of them, though in honor of my past I would start with the Pharaoh. My future suddenly seemed to be a vision of epiphanic beauty, and I could no longer understand how I had ever felt malcontent at the thought of waiting a mere three thousand years!

* * *

From that time on my room was a blank slate once again, but I had not returned to where I started in any way. I no longer felt the need to move or even breathe; all I needed was my vision. Was this, I wondered, what the prophets felt like?

Now I sometimes wonder what my host must feel, when he gets glimmers of my emotions. I know that our ability to share our feelings is not very strong—we are too incompatible, in spite of the fact that my spirit would have been reincarnated as him had it died properly—and yet even the occasional vague insights he gleans have dictated his course of study in college. Am I really such an incomprehensible being? I can't help but laugh at him, sometimes, because the very fact that he was chosen by the Ring shows that there must be _something_ connecting us. Yes—I believe that, deep down, he too derives pleasure from the pomegranate-red blood I like to show him... but he is still and probably always will be a frightened child who refuses to accept it.

**Owari**


End file.
